Cubase 9 - Customer feedback survey

Cubase
1

Hi all,

With Cubase 9 we directly involved our customer community during development and asked you to rank the most frequently requested features and improvements. The results of this survey have been more than helpful and as you can see in the list of new features, we managed to bring some of them into our latest release. But not only features, also workflow improvements and increased stability have been ranked high on our priority list and made their way into the release.

Now we would like to keep the ongoing exchange with you upright and therefore would appreciate your feedback on Cubase 9. Whether your are using Pro, Artist or Elements, we would like to invite you to a short survey to let us know how satisfied you are with our software. Even if you have not yet decided about updating or if you are skipping this update, please let us know why.

The survey will be active for the next 12 months in order to give you the chance to make up your mind about the new features and test Cubase 9 intensively in your productions and projects.

Here is the link
http://www.steinberg.net/cubase9feedback

Thanks,
Matthias

2

Thanks, good job!

Cheers,
Benji

3

It looks like 4 of the 5 top features from the last survey are implemented (?).

Copied the previous list:

  1. Parameter undo/redo history for MixConsole
  2. Enhanced window handling
  3. Extend options to import tracks/channels in a project
  4. Extend resizing possibilities for the rack zone
  5. Basic sampler

I guess anyone unhappy their feature request has not been implemented might want to raise it’s visibility and link to this survey

4

Unlimited inserts please! This is getting silly.

5

Really? Because that isn’t mentioned anywhere. Guy with a beard doesn’t say a thing substantive about stability. Or asio-guard. Or performance. Or bug fixes.

It would be super helpful then, if, among all the new features, some mention were made in the release PR about whatever audio engine & GUI performance improvements have been instituted, as well as bug fixes. So far, this release feels like a bit of a marketing shell-game, tbh.

6

Horrible experience every time I upgrade. And no support except from other frustrated customers. Can’t even install what I paid for. Friends with Logic or ProTools studios never complain of this BS. hmmm :imp: :imp: :smiling_imp:

7

Stability should not be a priority for a major release, it should be a priority for every release! Big or small.

8

Well, I like the idea of the survey on release. Neither the survey nor the Cubase 9 release were good experiences for me, so I’ll take a few moments here to explain why in both cases.

The Survey

This proved to be very short. I have both Elements for the laptop, and 8.5 Pro for the main rig. I figured the new features were (possibly) more relevant to the laptop, so bought 9 Elements to trial. There was no option to cover my situation - tried Elements, as a result decided to skip Pro 9 for now. All I ended up doing was ticking “other” as a reason not to buy - poor features - and that was the end of the survey. Not very helpful to anyone.

Cubase 9

Steinberg massively misread the mood of the user base on the thread I started here An open plea to Steinberg - Steinberg Lounge - Steinberg Forums - , which ran to 579 posts, 10 stars and over 46,000 views. The OP - and massive following support - was for stability, bug fixes and many small but important workflow improvements - scores of them, rather than a few big ticket unwanted items was the idea. This instead somehow became distilled to a list of (from memory) 16 features, many of which never featured in the discussion to choose from while many of the feature requests which come up time and again never appeared. A fait accomplis. From this, 5 got voted on, and we were told these were:

  1. Parameter undo/redo history for MixConsole
  2. Enhanced window handling
  3. Extend options to import tracks/channels in a project
  4. Extend resizing possibilities for the rack zone
  5. Basic sampler

To be clear - this list in no way reflected the mood of that thread, or anything close to my intentions on starting it, so really the game was lost right there. But nevertheless, let’s take a look at how Steinberg did according to its own manipulated criteria:

  1. Done - looks very good indeed, though it is inexplicably missing from Elements.
  2. Sort of done, but poor. The Lower Zone is a bust. It is useless for laptop owners and for multi-screen users. What you need for a mixer and for midi editing in particular is height. Being unable to simultaneously see a fader and a send, or all the notes in two handed playing, is pitiful. Really it is only an appropriate solution for those with single very large screens. A true tabbed window that could be placed or docked at will would have addressed this far, far better.
  3. Ignored.
  4. Done - and done well.
  5. Done, and integrated with a very poorly executed Sampler Track. You drag a small audio clip down to the sampler track, and then you realise you haven’t just dragged that small clip at all, you’ve dragged an entire 3 minute vocal take. Next, it adds a new Sampler track down at the bottom of the project window, not next to where you dragged it from, so your project window is now a mess. And it routes it to Stereo Out, not the group that the original track was routed to. So your mixer is a mess too. And there appears to be no place to work with it except in that dreaded Lower Zone. Once you’ve addressed all that, you discover that the quality of the time stretching is sub-1998 quality. Not a useful feature.

And that is it. No performance improvements. No fix for AsioGuard2 and VE Pro. No fixes for the still broken disabled track recalls, still less the asked for improvements. No additional inserts. No bezier curves. No faster load times. No render in place improvements. No wider scroll bars. No retina support. No video export. No no no no no.

I don’t know how we ever got from that Open Letter thread to Cubase 9’s paucity of everything. The idea was large numbers of small but very useful improvements. From where I am, I see two genuinely good new things - mixer undo and a resizable VST rack. The other features have far too many problems associated with them to be classified as mission accomplished, even on that tiny little top 5 list.

9

Ever got an Apple developer reply to a thread on their forums? Wake up. The support from the Steinberg Developers here at the forum is top notch!

10

You must be joking. I have never got a response from anyone at Steinberg

11

Are you being an a** or something? I have always had support requests in 24- 30 hours. Once it was a few days but it was a holiday weekend.

Why is it the feedback is immediately the grouchy ones complaining? :slight_smile: I know, I’m just kidding…

BTW the crappy cursor is still there. I’m not happy about that…

12

… speaking of exchange…
Can we have provided a break down of the statistics of last [ years ] survey?
{
How many users responded ?
From what regions of the world?
For which products/groupings
What were aggregated counts regarding the ranking of “feature request”
What were the aggregated counts regarding the ranking for “Please we need this bug FIXed now?!”
what were the aggregated counts of the other questions
}

I would be curious to review next years Dec.2017 C9.5 (or C10) released features :

Maybe…if people completing the C9 survey, if a note/record/screen print of your responses are kept, it would be interesting to formulate a ‘community view’ of :
"(USERS_list of survey_replies) versus (SB deployment of next release features) "

… just sayin’ it would be good to see “how representative” it [really] is

13

I’m pretty sure Steinberg developer team are great and creative!

BUT! Marketing team ruining it! Why u holding adding some new features in years? if you guys are really marketing sharks u should listen to people who pay to u. If not, you should find other company.

everyone already knows what u will add in Cubase 9.5, in Cubase 10… and so on.

why not just add it all in 9 ? lack of ideas?

14

Long time user. I was really disappointed. I was not expecting too much but I got less than that. When it boils down to it these are the features as I see them

1] Lower Zone: Can’t actually see the faders in enough detail on a laptop (even when stretched), If you do this you can’t see hardly anything in the project window which defeats the point here. If you really wanted a similar arrangment in C8, then it’s easy to set up. On my dual 49" monitor system its superfluous too I prefer the mixer free. What we need is dockable windows - this is obvious and has been asked for since sx3.

2] Mixer undos. No saving of A and B comparisons, just the history, which is more cumbersome.

3] Sampler tracks - a toy really, no ability to split the keyboard or layer- these very basic facilities missing.

4] EQ is this better than the Voxengo? Possibly…

5] Plugin tweaks - are plugin tweaks, most pros use their own plugins.

6] Side Chaining - has been possible at least since C5.

7] Production grooves - free samples are everywhere. Ok we have some more.

8] Multiple Marker tracks - very welcome.

9] Smaller Racks - welcome.

10] Transport improvements - very welcome.



MIDI improvements - there are none that I can find, hopefully I am wrong?

The color scheme thing is simply awful it cannot be called an improvement, its dark and clashy. The posts here about it here are about how to turn it off.

MIDI is half of a DAW. As a composer I was hoping for at least improved expression maps - why on earth was this not ported from Dorico, which already has a slicker expression map interface?

Many of the behind the scenes minor gui’s can be improved. Take the preferences or VST connections dialogues - why can’t you see if you have loaded your presets? You load a pref, the next time you look there is a blank box. The saving of preferences is also cumbersome and must be done blindly without proper visual feedback. Why is this just left this way over many generations?

No sign of Dorico lite? Well hopefully this will be soon.


Improvements in the way Cubase handles RAM. So much of the time 90% of header samples loaded into RAM are simply superfluous - unnecessarily pushing the daw. When a track is not being edited/recorded most of the samples are not required.

I love Cubase, but it worries me that this can be released as ‘major’ update, its a minor update.

Please, look after your users, I would hate to see Cubase’s reputation descend. All over the web, users are not happy with this release, face up to this fact, put together some proper improvements and release them as a free update soon, or face loosing your reputation for major innovations.

Z

15

Thanks for the feedback. I thought this was be an insta-purchase but am holding back now.

If they had fully ported GASE4 to the new sampler track that would have swayed me. But it seems like it’s been crippled purposely for some reason. All they had to do was put the same code into that new GUI minus the pads (or even give the option to show those too, basically replacing the need to load the GASE4 plugin).

Still no hardware insert improvements like M/S or Wet/Dry control (maybe this isn’t their most requested feature but how hard can it be).

16

Wondering why such things were not made in German (Forum)?

Furthermore still waiting to have the same Forum (Support) in German as in English.

17

Can you explain what you mean?

18

Just take a look to the topic and look into the German Cubae Forum and you may notice the differences and missing topics…

19

I miss a Feature-Request-Thread in the german forum.

20

Indeed :slight_smile: :exclamation: